After everything's finished compiling, start xine, set whatever options you need to get started (it'll open the Configuration utility your first time starting it), click d5d, then click play. Press f to switch to full screen. Xine does the best job of playing DVDs that I've yet to come across in Linux.

hmm... I've actually seen MPlayer do the same thing, and in order to get it to blow the picture up to full screen I had to pass some special parameter from the command line (--zoom, or something like that). Try reading the man page and see if it mentions anything similar.

A computer monitor has the same width to height ratio on the display as a television, so the only way to get rid of the black letterbox bars is to cut the sides off of the image and zoom in on what is left until it fills up the screen. I assume this is what you are trying to do.

I'm not sure if such a feature exists because it would completely destroy the movie. Movies are filmed widescreen and they can be 'formatted to fit your television screen' - the image is clipped professionally so that the focus of the image as well as the director's style is maintained as best as possible.

I hope I didn't miss interpret what you were trying to do, or just tell you something you already know, but there's the reason why directors always push for widescreen - it's the way they filmed it.